Sunday, August 10, 2008

(Click the cartoon and make it HUGER!)Today's Bizarro is brought to you by Where The Hell Was I Yesterday?

The five or six of you who check into this blog every day (my favorite people in the world, by the way! Even more precious than my own children!) will have noticed that I did not post yesterday. Of those five or six, three or four were likely up all night with the local authorities, searching the woods for me, calling their contacts in the Middle East to see if I had been kidnapped by terrorists. Sorry to have inconvenienced you, my precious blog readers. I shall endeavor not to do it again.

Truth is, I woke up late, ran some errands, went to a memorial service for a friend, had some dinner, came home late and just didn't feel up to posting so belatedly. Nothing more than an average dose of real life for real people. Thanks for your concern and, yes, I remembered to pick up my crazy pills from the CVS on 17th.

I dig the cartoon above. It was a collaborative effort between myself (duh) and a smarty pants I know in Florida, name of Mark Brandt. His original notion was about the Italian vacation on the cheap, using real towns in the south. I added the recession angle, the old-time advertisement map style, prices, etc.

Below is the title panel I created for it, which not all papers that carry the Sunday Bizarro use. I love satirizing product labels for some reason.

If you don't have an Italian/English dictionary at your elbow, "Villa Torta" more-or-less means "Pie House." Get it?! Get it?!One last bit: Here is the cartoon I missed posting yesterday. It is Francesco's last of the week, though he did a Sunday cartoon for me that will print on August 24.

Because I'm an advocate for the abolition of animal slavery of all kinds, I love, love, love this cartoon. I used to be critical of some people's tendency to anthropomorphize animals. But the more scientists learn about the nature of other species, the more they discover similarities to humans in areas like emotions and sentience. Now I believe that we do not anthropomorphize them enough. Currently, I won't do or subsidize doing anything to any animal that I wouldn't do to a human toddler.

Glad you're back! Nice work on the label/title panel. Also, I loved Francesco's week of fill-in strips. I've been a fan of his own stuff for a few years now ("Teenage Girl President" is genius) so having him do some Bizarro strips was a chance to see two of my favorite cartoonists collide.

I'm genuinely curious about your ethical position: you write "I won't do or subsidize doing anything to any animal that I wouldn't do to a human toddler." If I knew there were toddlers out in the woods behind my house in danger of being eaten, I would take action to prevent it. But surely you wouldn't do this for rabbits, for example. You'd have to destroy the entire ecosystem to take this to it's logical conclusion. So how is this morally acceptible, if you consider animals the moral equivalent of people? Like I say, I just want to know. I'm trying to make up my own mind about what I think about animal ethics.

think original, think never before seen...duplicating what you do in the real world is duplicious...you could be doing so much more creative work here with no editor and nothing but fans to comment...duplicating Ces is well a mind altering bad use of the internet.

Regarding my ethical postition: I won't do anything to an animal that I won't do to a human child within real life. In other words, there are not toddlers in the woods, so the problem is hypothetical. True carnivores eating other animals is natural, so I don't step in. Modern human use of animals is anything but natural or necessary, so this is the sort of activity that I will not be involved in. Regarding unborn children, my concern is sentience, as opposed to a spiritual reverence for life. The vast majority of abortions are performed on a bundle of cells with no brain activity. The last thing this world needs is more humans and the fetus has no sentience, so I'm all for terminating early pregnancies. Late term abortions occur under a wide variety of circumstances, usually regarding health threats to the mother, so that's a whole other topic.

I love your depictions of scientists, but feel the need to make a note- yes, a scientist is supposed to strive to be unbiased, but you have to choose something to research. Researching something takes time and money, so you end up wanting what you're researching to be important somehow. So you end up with the bias that what you are researching is right, and you try to prove it; basically self interest and self bias. The difference from other professions is that typically, for any scientific finding to be really recognized, you have to submit it to a journal where many of the people who disagree with you have the chance to reject your findings as unproven before the journal ever publishes it. Therefore the rigour is more in the process than the individual.RobGrad Student of Computer Science, still stuck in Dallas

The dictionary definition of "sentience" is "feeling or sensation as distinguished from perception and thought." A sentient creature is "responsive to or conscious of sense impressions." Objection 1: how do you know a fetus isn't sentient during the first three weeks of life as sentience is a difficult quality to observe. Objection 2: if sentience is consciousness of the senses, what about someone who is in a coma? They are unresponsive, unaware, and unconscious of their senses. In other words, an unconscious person or animal is not sentient. Yet, most people would agree that it is wrong to kill someone who is in a comatose state.

I love Francesco Marciuliano's cartoon! And whilst I haven't gotten round to actually reading much of Jonathan Balcombe's *Pleasurable Kingdom* yet (too busy, aargh!), I have seen him speak and from that and the bits I actually did manage to read, I can only tell people to go and buy the book! (Or read it in the library) Besides, he used Bizarro cartoons in his lecture, that's got to score him some brownie points with readers of this blog, right? :))